Welfare Burger

True punk-rock spirit, as evidenced back in the day. Keep on it, man.

It's hard for our brothers and sisters around the world to tap into our common consciousness, beset as they are in this world by the woes cast upon them through continued war, famine, and injustice. That's why it's so important for us to speak up whenever we encounter wrong, difficult as they may be to do at times, because we often traverse the worst adversities when we are at our loneliest low points in life, but just like that old Christian poem "Footsteps"*, it just seems that way from the outside looking in. It is then when you are carried by The Lord Our G-d, as His Most Faithfully Beleaguered in Faith. As so often happens in my life, outsiders see one reality when in truth, it's the exact opposite of what they presume it to be, and that very deception is what leads them down the wrong path.

I meat a bleary-eyed Ecuadorean the other day on the street while he was waiting for the bus. I'd noticed him from the other side of the street before, because he stared at me like I was levitating across the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, instead of me hatted up and running an errand, sans makeup. In fact, when we crossed paths, I explained to him that I spend zero dollars ($0) on my appearance. But, but...he sputtered, swaying a little on his heels, I'm so pretty! Now that you've gotten to know me better, that sounds funny, right? Like, asking Jesus when he got his last pedicure while he walks around poorly shod in a pair of old worn sandals, but I was charmed by my new friend.

After all, that's what he was raised to believe in. Pretty girl = easy street, just add (+) one man. Done deal! Of course, that's an absurd way to think, because I'm not a prostitute for hire based solely on my looks (not that I mind beauty as a visual artist because it's part of my world) but in many American cultures, beauty is mythologized to such an extent (especially if you're a drunk, divorced, red-eyed Central American grandpa waiting on a cold Northern sidewalk for a public bus that's on slow rollin' country time), that talking to someone like me seems like, how can this be true ?! Oh, it be, brother man. I assure you of that, esse.

You see, when you're out there in the real world, you don't just get a small slice of pie from the same place over and over again (my G-d, the horror of that!), you eat "the whole enchilada" as they say, and that's exactly how me and my crew play this game called life: like it's winning just to be here, because we come across a lot of "walking dead" out there; bombed-out, brain-dead folks just wandering listlessly throughout their days, so unconscious and unplugged from the world as it exists, waiting to die. A nightmare...and so, when we see something we don't like, we say something, because speaking up is an action that leads to other actions, even if at first it's just misguided thoughts (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/06/say-something.html). It's all part of your training.

Most of my peers have already reached the type of early success that puts us in direct proximity to junior staff who need constant mentoring and teaching because we're tradespeople, and giving back to underlings is crafted into our lifestyles. I teach every day that I'm alive, even if it doesn't fit into your misconceptions about relegating learning to some far away classroom staffed by someone else, even though that someone else is probably someone I went to school with, here in New York, and I can also out-teach any day of the week. My creative hierarchies necessitated me into learning many many abilities so well just to stay competitive and on the job, that I can teach you in another language (in your native language, since you can't speak mine), using whatever tools you have handy.

After you do that for many years like we have, you develop a sophisticated routine centered around schooling. And so, when my Coloradan ex-boyfriend decided to take his act on the road by lecturing the Asian liquor store owner down the block from us in our Denver neighborhood, I couldn't have clapped harder for him in appreciation if I tried. It was one of my most favorite characteristics about him: that he used his power and prestige as a high-earning white man in our society to tell people what they avoided hearing through deliberately planned abusive neglect, by feigning continued ignorance about well-known facets of our American lives. On one such afternoon, I guess Kent had enough of the hypocritical bullshit, because he told me that he finally told the Korean owner what was up, and I was enraptured.

Kent liked to buy some booze to put into his little biker backpack that they make just for riders to squeeze liquid into their mouths during a ride (yeah, not the best use of it, but you don't know his full story and it is massively bad), so he could meander around town on the many bike paths that line the area in an inter-connected web that's the envy of older cities, though the common practice of compulsive over-exercise to cover up a serious mental disorder as it is used out west is a whole other article entirely. Suffice to say that he was familiar with the lay of the land, as he'd lived in town for many years, spending his days driving through he streets that he didn't bike, as a Master Electrician with his own junior apprentice to school in the trade.

I guess he figured he'd had enough of the shit show we'd seen play out unfairly in society over the years, because he and I talked about the judicious use of "mixed residential" zoning laws that are the mark of enlightened urban planning in newer cities like Denver, escaping the common traps most older cities succumb to, like the bust-and-boom, up-and-down patterns that characterize the instant ghettos and gentrified private parks with silver key access that define New York City life. We'd seen our native cities go down fast that way, like he had with the council flats in England, and I did with the projects in the city. Urban planning had created instant ghettos that insured encircled and entrapped cycles of poverty that no one could escape from, let alone a terrorized impoverished people who'd descended from the cruel mistreatment of corrupt plantation owners from centuries past.

We had enough, and it was reflected through his band's song titles about injustices that I felt keenly in my life, too. Kent told me back at our place that as he was walking back to the cooler for a cold drink, he couldn't help but razz the wealthy owner into embarrassment. We'd seen him cruise up to his immigrant business in the 'hood with a brand new Benz curbside, strategically placed as it was right across the street from public housing that was clearly demarcated as such with bolted-on plaques across the front row of old brick townhomes, across the street from his ghetto liquor store. Who the fuck did he think he was? What right did he have to come here and pick off the "po' black folk" with instant access to the very poison that killed them and their brains, by walling himself behind a plastic partition like some pussy?

Kent and I had seen him roll up in his fancy car in our urban neighborhood with his clean little prep school boy, all nice and pressed in his fancy private school clothes, but what right did he have to set up shop across the street from the poorest folks in town? Huh? Kent said he just stood there towering over this little guy and his small prep school kid. They played the whole smiling " haha...no speaky engrish" game with him that they'd been taught by the very people they bought the place from, with one very important caveat left unwritten but certainly lived out loud for the whole block to see: American assimilation is possible in one quick generation, you just have to sell out the more beset "minority" beneath you on the totem pole, even though there's no fucking way any Chinese-American can be a fucking minority, when China and the Americas are this fucking big. 

Nice try, though. "Kunta-Kente"**, you're my straight-up superhero, man! Don't ever change, bro, no matter how hard they grind you down. You're beautiful to me, baby. "Papa" this! We did, you know that, right? We really did show that small town what living is all about, be it with this century's immigrants or the very next ones. Still have your passport with your little boy Visa photo? That shit's adorable, kid, even if you did have a rough go of coming and going whilst traveling back and forth from "The Motherland", because someone (ahem, you know who) fluffed your fucking birth date on your kiddie passport, to give you a ride every time you exited and entered the country of your own free will. Who would do that to their kid going into a new country, you know? We do! Don't change a thing, baby. You're perfect just the way G-d made you to be. Amen to you, brother. This one's for you and yours today, baby. We're all red on the inside: http://taylorseafood.co.uk/ and http://www.taylorfoods.co.uk/

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=welfare+burger

* http://www.onlythebible.com/Poems/Footprints-in-the-Sand-Poem.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunta_Kinte

Office Cow

Much like Ricky Gervais and other really successful people, I always knew office life wasn't for me, from the very beginning of my post-college career. I adapted as much as I could to the guy who twitched all day long with no ramifications because he did the repetitive grunt work no one else wanted to do before they dumped him, or the violently aggressive secretary who's almost always desperately promiscuous because someone along the way encouraged this rather plain girl to use her looks to get ahead, putting a young woman in a seat of responsibility that even very beautiful women have trouble handling. How do you become a beauty on a typical office worker's salary? You don't, which is why most of the "office girls" go for men that they think have economic power to "liberate" them from the horrors of their own labors; an insanely fantastic proposition, if ever there was.

Why would most "suits" care what a woman wants, anyway? They're often as disposable as next year's younger, blonder, bustier model, leading to the next societal craze we're in right now called "reality t.v.", for the next generation of office bimbo turned alcoholic housewife. Ugh...shudder. She's the woman I've fought hard my entire life to never become, not that I could have done it easily. I love home economics and child rearing, since I've been running other people's households (and offices) for all of my life thus far, which has given me enough time to be here with you while at home, too. I've become the way to have it all that reveals how we, as women, can really do it without sacrificing our bodies and our sanity, though there's always some compromises to be made in any real life.

But growing up, we had precious few role models. I was lucky to have a classy, ethical mentor my first job out in the real world, though she does not have the traditional husband and kids, but a very long-term partnership with a man that has outlasted many marriages. There's a lot of good in it, but she realizes that if she changed one component of her very successful life, another would have to go out the window, and that was too much to sacrifice. The other model for older women in the workforce was the unfortunate 80s stereotype of the square-shouldered "power lesbian", a woman who mimicked the mannerisms of men to blend into the boy's club: definitely not the right choice for women who live openly with their beloved male counterparts, like I do. What would a masculine energy from me do for a hetero man? Not much, and I certainly don't want to be the man in my relationship.

And so I did what many healthy women in business have done before me, with their fingers crossed: I've worked hard daily to be the best, while relying on my naturally long-lived fertility that I was blessed to inherit while I jettisoned the many "Mr. Wrongs" who can't hold up their end of my relationships. And then I waited. And waited some more. And then, some more, working all the while. It takes faith, stamina, confidence, and an amazing amount of experience to master the art of patience, something my very dear maternal grandmother told me wisely more than once that I needed to learn, and her seeds of wisdom have never failed to blossom within me. She was that good, ya'll. But along the way, I've seen some really ugly stuff, tropes of broken women that I hope we successfully breed out forever.

Top of my list is the woman who picks a man to co-dependently enable by stroking his ego and feeding into his vanity, while spending his money as fast as she can, because that's the business arrangement they made. It's a form of prostitution to sell yourself short like that, one deeply rooted in a woman's insecurity and fear. Where would you be without your man? Dead?! How can that be, when we were made to live? It doesn't make any sense, and I've heard every type of justification from that type of woman that exists, shallow and dumb as they are. It's a deeply disturbing thing to do with one's life; throwing it away on the promise of a man-made freedom through money. Whatcho gonna do with all that money, any how? Sleep with it? 

That's what my people told me all my life: money doesn't keep you warm at night. People do. Not that skipping through beds and partners should be a full-time thing. Every grown woman I know gravely looks forward to a good night's sleep free of night terrors (just look at her dark under-eye circles, man), be they from yo' man or yo' kids, right? If it ain't that, then it's the dog throwing up all night seeking comfort. Amen to a nice night at a hotel somewhere and just let me sleep! Lack of sleep makes a person desperate for relief, and that was a lot of the hurt that I saw playing itself out in offices throughout the world; women just trying to stay afloat, treading water and looking for help when none was given to them without some sort of price tag attached to it. Doesn't sound Christian or hetero to me at all. Does that sound normal to you?

So, I learned to live around other people's sexualities, preferences, and/or mental disorders, because during my entire time in other people's offices, the one common message I always got was this: you don't belong there, and that's actually true. I belong here, with all of you. Like, take this one typical dyed blond booby from Long Island; she stuffed every dopey cliche about receptionists into one horrible package, like a nightmare thing from someone else's fictional story, because I sure don't play that way. She was aggressive, gossipy, bitchy, stupid, angry, openly hostile and derisive, and when that didn't work, she tried sleeping with everyone in the office (I mean everyone, male or female) under the guise of her many storied disorders which were, of course, much more important than the good work that I did daily to pay her stupid bills, which were many, too. 

Her "body image issues" were everyone else's fucking problems too, as were the gory details of her stupid sex life which, shocking and active as it was, sucked badly, because she couldn't figure out how to even do that right, even after all of her practice. She was a "poor lay" as they say, and that was the worst secret of them all, outside of her bisexual, daddy-molestation tales, told salaciously in the light of noon in a generic publishing office that was anything but the blandly raunchy bar she wanted it to be, which leads me to her classification as a day-to-day type that you all should not only run from, but fire immediately upon realization, and that is this: she was the perfect "Office Cow", a rightly demeaning term dubbed by my excellently clever ex-boyfriend from Colorado, bless his funny British/Scottish ass. You got me on that one, lad!

Kent and I met at the Denver-area recording studio that I worked at out west, after my brief marriage to an unsuitable partner was naturally dissolved with "no-fault" tied to either side (he can't fulfill normal marriage obligations due to his illnesses), and we immediately became friends. He's one smart muthfucka! We met over his low-budget punk rock project that overflowed with quick-witted lyrics and song titles. It was genius, man, and I loved him right away. We took to each other like soldiers fighting in his crazy Christian army, with his beautiful, classically-rendered tattoo of G-d's Rapture from a famous tattooist prominently displayed on his big meaty forearm proudly. I immediately loved the art behind it, like we were two angels fighting the "End of Days", thrown together by circumstance. We got on that well, initially. Even though we were actually more friends than romantic partners, we got on well enough to share home and hounds for a time.

You see, he had the same war stories of me, as the "big man on campus" who made an electrical engineers salary in an area that made him seem extremely desirable, except that he isn't, really. Not for an average office girl. My big lad from back then was a high-paid electrician (with the apprentice, equipment, and annually-renewed state license to prove it), a one-time sponsored downhill bike racer (I saw his lift ticket of him in sponsored gear from back in the day to prove it, because as big as he was, he could be dodgy on some of the details to impress me deliberately, which I actually found rather charming from a man of his size), and he had played with some of the most prominent punk bands from back in the day (making him a bona fide rock star to boot, because I saw the road pics of him as a backup guitarist with "Agression", a southern Californian skater band), and he became a private pilot during my watch, too. Top that, son!

Needless, I didn't have all that much competition from the local ladies. He told me they did weird stuff like look at his weekly pay-stubs to form dating strategies within earshot, as he passed through the office. Because they were too dumb to perform well at their jobs, they went looking for "Mr. Paycheck" instead, without taking the time to get to know him or share his interests, like I did. He told me that they brazenly gossiped in front of him (as their company's top earner), making him feel like an awful piece of meat every time he passed through the office (I saw some of the girls on one of our first dates: 
a football-viewing Super Bowl party given at one of their homes. I wore my one and only Broncos jersey that's now long gone, New Yorkers), which was part of the point. To them, your participation is mandatory in their world, even though they practically live and die off of his salary and earning power. It was something that I immediately identified with, being a "big earner" myself.

Neither one of us wanted to be used for money, sensitive as we are to being seen as disposable by multiple-marriage families. His mum decided to just start a second family by adopting some junkie's kid on the cheap, as is so often the case with sick parents who create patterns of the same wrecked families, littered behind them as wreckage they see as acceptable to their selfish aims: the anti-thesis of family, if ever there was. I was reminded of him every time I encountered a disaster of a office gal. Each and every time I met one, I often laughed to myself as the sole sane witness to a highly repetitive calamity. It became no clearer to me than during one particularly ornery job, where I struggled to keep this family's guard dog on a leash tied to their front desk from tearing out my throat in blind envy, interspersed with her loudly vocalized eating disorder that was punctuated by "mm bitch" "mm" "bitch", every time some plain girl from the Midwest dared to bring in homemade baked goods into the office, because she (of course) did it to sabotage her on purpose.

Why else would she do it? What kind of sick person makes cookies at home to serve for family holidays, and then shares them with her co-workers by leaving a warm note on top of them in the company kitchen? The horror! It was just sick, man, the way this family allowed some sick bitch to foam at the mouth while gorging herself covertly on some young wife's attempt at domesticity in a city not of her choosing, and certainly not of her birth. I mean, how dare she? Who did she fucking think she was? Bitch! Ayelet was the lead girl, and we violated her corrupt controlling by freely eating the well-made baked goods of a Nebraskan farm girl who also liked to sew in her spare time, in over her head from both this high-stress job and her new marriage in our city of many lights. Go home! Go away! Get out! Who the fuck did you think you were anyway, Natasha? "Office Cow!"

Sugar Monkey

I've had a sick mother all my life, but she will deny it almost every time you ask her about it, except on those days when she chooses to be agreeable about it, and that's about the best way to describe it, in a nutshell. When I was little, her back hurt too much to carry me, after years of toting my much bigger and older brothers around, so she told all of us that she had a "bad back" with perhaps an early onset of arthritis. After that, she made a big deal about lying down in total quiet and darkness ("I must lie prone and still for awhile in utter darkness and silence. Thank you...": cue whispered sick voice), and if anything dared disturb her during resting time periods, she became imperious and abusive, like a mythical princess complaining about feeling a pea under several mattresses, which wasn't far off from her off-Broadway version.

She made my dad put a wooden board under their mattress that was already super hard or "orthopedic", because my mom loves to use medical-sounding words to describe her psychic pains. If we dared wake her up in the middle of night with our bad dreams, she sprang up like a vampire roused out of it's coffin before nightfall, gasping for breath and completely cold. She told us we couldn't move the bed at all, because every "jar" we made gave her excruciating pains to her lower back. When she really did break her back by her continued insistence on tennis lessons after her MS diagnosis (my mom has never been an athlete ever, but she'll lie about that most days, too), she told us that she had to lay perfectly still to get a good nights sleep.

And so it went. When my paternal grandmother took ill during a visit to our house, my mom took the opportunity to play out a hysteric scene that included dramatically folding like crumpled paper and dropping to the hospital floor in pain, even though she wasn't the one dying. "That's when my MS 'kicked in'"!" she likes to tell people, blaming my dead grandmother for her still undiagnosed illness. 

After the gift of MS was given to her, anything and everything became an excuse to cover her tracks, ones that often lead her to describe her self-prescribed "issues" with someone else as the source of all of her angst, aches, and pains besides herself. When I got laid off, she used me as the primary target for her "depression", so she could get an anti-depressive prescription from her neurologist in the city.

Because I can accurately construct a real timeline for just about anything, she dumped me from doctor duty because I was hip to her game. Her and her weirdo sisters do crazy shit like take limo rides to see a "specialist" in the city, but they'd ignore you being homeless at their feet, just like her phony church lady sister who uses the church to fill in her dull, lifeless schedule. She'll tell you she's religious, but she's just mouthing the words. My mother is tricky, though, because even if she's "crying wolf", she may actually be hurt, but she wants to parlay it into another type of scenario over healing quickly, because that would rob her of stringing it out into series of soap opera-like vignettes that she can fill in her time with, too. She's told me to my face that she likes to visit "quacks" because she has this delusional idea that she can "Jedi mind-trick" them into giving her any type of pills she wants.

My mom absolutely loves hoarding medicine and papers, too, which makes it visually easy for me to assess exactly where her head is at. Because she has a background as a lab technician, she's savvy enough to work a con game that includes official-sounding language to mask her real symptoms, and she thinks she's really good at it, but not with me. She does genuinely have a lot of disorders, and those I take very seriously. Right now she has really bad mouth pain that she calls "Neuralgia", which may or may not be related to MS nerve damage, but she's had it for years even though she can't quite remember. I took her to a few dentists in exploration of her condition with no solutions, thus giving her a great excuse to go into full-on "Princess mode" by booking a fancy car and whisking away into the city for a glamorous turn with a pricey doctor (hopefully handsome, too, so she can visit him many times over) at a certain university she used to work at many years ago, giving her the proper amount of attention she feels she deserves.

Ditto with her diet. She and her siblings all have eating disorders (which they call "food issues"), like they're at a dainty, white-gloved tea party for debutantes only. It's insane because they all have such a thick lowbrow Bronx accents that people outside of the tri-state area can't understand them when they speak. They're the ultimate provincials with arrogant "bougie" ways, a striking contrast between their continued, ongoing ill health and a certain glowing girl who was made to do chores for them all of her life, because they don't have time with their "busy schedules". It's insanely ridiculous, because they're basically office workers, with the soft stubby bodies to prove it. 
My mom has almost no muscle whatsoever at times, making her extremely prone to back-breaking falls, until we forced her into a regular schedule of PT/OT that she's since become accustomed to, though at first she treated her healthcare professional like a manicurist she could wave away when she didn't feel like it.

Of course, I found an expert therapist who also uses her training in clinical psychology with the elderly to work my mom (she mistakenly dropped the info that I have to remind her about during one particularly grueling circular argument she was desperate to win against me), because my mom likes to threaten to throw people into mental institutions if they don't follow her commands. It's a childish game of "I know you are, but what am I" that continues until her stress has been released through the heightened, angry confrontation (like a toddler does when tired), immediately forgotten after she gets her chemical payoff from her angst, which is followed by an equally nuts game of "I have no idea what you're talking about", milking the doddering senior act for all its worth, because she got caught making threats again.

Then, her head droops onto on her chest, falling asleep while you're speaking to her in mid-sentence, in complete opposition to her awkward hyper-vigilant tenseness a mere minute or so ago. If anyone dares to suggest to her that she should take a nap, or notices how weird it is for her to tune out the way she does in the middle of a conversation, she snaps to her next compulsive routine that centers around tea. You see, my mom has also been a sugar addict all of her life. I'm sure it's fun as heck for her healthcare team to deal with. When I told her this past weekend that she was "my sugar monkey", she laughed delightedly at it, like it was a game of truth-or-dare for her to win, which is so fucking odd, because I've known her all my life. She wakes up to several strong cups of coffee with sugar, and continues her hard usage throughout the day, using our Irish tea tradition to cover up her over-ingestion of cookies, cakes, crackers, and pie.

Anyone who dares to mention her nod-offs to her gets the ole MS-related excuse (which could actually be true, if she's between her doses), or her exhaustion from metal distress (uh uh...we've given my mom a very easy life compared to ours), or it's simply because she's getting older. Some of it may be true, some of it may be her delusional fantasies, or some combination of both. I've never met a better liar than my mom. Even the hardcore drug and alcohol junkies in my family lie weaker than her, so good and practiced she is at it, though with her type of checking out, I'm not sure if she knows. Recent studies have shown what we've always known to be true, that treetop monkeys eat a leaner type of diet that lends them a calmness denied to their bottom-feeding fruit-eating monkeys as the epitome of over-aggression, fighting with their band of monkeys throughout the day. Guess which one you are, mom? Guess which one your special little monkey is? "Oo oo"! 

It's not a problem for me, though. I know her better than anyone, because I've taken care of her the longest. It's okay: I'll grab you the best fruit from the top of the tree, mama. Ain't never gonna let you go down on my watch. Just remember: "fructose is sugar, too", Dr. Diane and have at it, my lil "Sugar Monkey"! Here's that recent data we talked about this past weekend, while you ate pie in the middle of the day that would have given me an instantly vicious headache (http://bit.ly/1SuPkTG). I just talked and watched and waited on her as she ate, salvaging some cheese crackers from her pantry (she keeps anywhere from 6-12 boxes on hand, because "they're all different"). By the way, did you notice you didn't get the healthier turkey leftovers? 

They gave you some of the desserts, and someone was rude enough to cram different pie types of top of each other in an angry rush (like women who diet compulsively do), in a rude gesture that said you aren't even worth the time it takes to separate desserts carefully into sections, just sloppily crammed on top of one another, in shame and haste. I saw that, too. And that cherry had no flavor, the one I picked out of the pie tin to taste while you ate slices of coconut cream pie. 

It was the strangest thing, given how much your family protests to be "foodies", isn't it? That pie had no absolutely no cherry flavor at all....it was just one dull sweet note with no flavor, like the kind of food served in hell, cruelly robbed of any taste as a punishment for someone who suffers from, say, gluttony as a vice. Odd, don't you think? 

http://orthomolecular.org/library/articles/webach.shtml

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/01/07/sugar-health-research

http://abc13.com/health/study-sugar-is-as-addictive-as-cocaine/533979/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/

Eat "Phresh"

Homemade, yo! This is me and my making, kids. Try it at home.

People from the 'hood are all crazy, which is the point. Hate someone different than you? Disenfranchise them through systemic abuses that are also lawful, and then push them to the margins to suffer sight unseen, where they will languish until the next generation also has hurt encoded within their DNA, like a ticking time bomb. It's certainly one of the motives behind every mass genocide perpetrated throughout human history; to deliver wrongs unto you and your children that they won't recover from, except for one minor detail. We know about it, with the "we" being you and me and anyone else reading this, hip to the game that plays out between good and evil every day, on this chessboard that is life itself.

So, while the t.v. media machine churned out canned surprise, showy tongue-clucking, and a false show of horror at some well-known sandwich shills' public downfall, I chuckled wryly to myself as I watched what passes for news these days, having been down this road before. I had a friend who nervously spit out common sayings as a means of coping with stress, or when she couldn't quite figure out solutions to the problem at hand, and that was this: where there's smoke, there's fire. It's kinda like the "from the frying pan into the fire", which is also the name of a tugboat restaurant called "The Frying Pan" that's parked in New York's Hudson River. That was one of the last times I saw my poorly beleaguered friend.

You see, when I was still a junior designer in New York, I worked with a twitchy Italian-American woman who has a constant expression of wide-eyed tension on her face at all times, accurately reflecting her nervously compulsive state of being. She could do the same task twenty million times, but she was also co-dependent on the people around her to lean on when she gave out (as long as she paid them to be her allies and friends), when they were really supposed to be co-workers and employees. She was hooked on shopping (made worse by her studios' location in a building known for wholesalers who had seasonal sample sales all the time), driving her to create fake acts of kindness ("Let's close the studio and shop!"), when we really were just recycling our pay out of one pocket and into another.

I didn't really mind the break from my labors that were sometimes challenging but often somewhat mindless (I was still paying my dues in the industry) plus I'm no addict, but her longtime assistant fared worse under her strict guidelines, for living off of what she considered "her" dime: Carrie was overweight, divorced, and living with her mother, though when I was there, she was recently spared her free "Pizza Fridays" because our boss was on a new diet, one that depended greatly on buying this company's kind of food. It was baffling, just like her heated and almost daily arguments with her second husband, a stressed-out Italian-American cop who was clearly part of her pattern. She didn't have any children, and by the freaked out way she had about her all the time, I knew better than to ask. She was a woman at that age when being barren can crack a fragile woman hard.

Because of her touchy mannerisms, I made her at first for a pampered, kept woman, but over the course of my freelance employ there (she couldn't afford to pay me health insurance but kept me on as part of her office staff for two years, which is now illegal to do in NYC), I found out that she was just like any other New Yorker struggling with a big dysfunctional family and living in a small cheap apartment in Mount Vernon, like the rest of us. It was weird, but given her odd eccentricities, it made total sense. Her arrogant sense of superiority hid obvious insecurities, with her rather tenuous hold on reality.

After a time, me and the woman who worked for her at her design firm asked her a direct question one afternoon, emboldened with knowing looks we gave each other as we turned our office chairs to her, because our computers faced the walls with our backs to one another, leaving the owner to be the only one who could see all three computers at the same time, and that was this: what exactly do you intend to do when you stop paying some company to feed you? How will you feed yourself? She shrugged it off lightly, playing busy with never-ending deadlines, brushing off our serious question with a pointedly dumb shrug, "I guess I'll just have to keep buying their food," which was our exact point to her: you need to buy their chemically laden food to stay "thin" because you can't do it on your own, despite her status at the time as a publishing expert with access to just about any type of information that existed on the planet. 

Welcome to "AA" in this century, Carol! I'll see you later on, if you've indeed mastered food and nutrition, yet. I know I have. By the way, I know you scoped me out upon my return to New York City from out west, after I visited you openly in your office empty of employees, because your business went downhill when Vince's business dried up, and you were both coasting on back-list content created by a lot of other artists and designers, like me and Carrie. You thought you were spying on me during my visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral to light a candle but, my dear, I both heard and saw you there out of the corner of my eye, mumbling to yourself that I was still "too young" and "too pretty" for you to talk to anymore, because you felt that you didn't have any advantages over me anymore. Clever, girl. You never did. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Fogle 

Intermittent Fasting

Fasting has deep roots in human culture, one that predates the selling of trendy "diet" books like we have today by many years. How do I know? Surely, you jest. As a publishing executive, it's part of my job, though not always to my liking, like when I worked in the past for other people's houses* and not mine. You don't have to be as gifted as me to succeed in business without even trying. Sometimes, you just need a rich white daddy who wants a tax shelter and a continued stake in the game, know what I'm sayin'? Sure, you do. We've all worked for people who are much less than talented than us because they had access to money that large sections of the populace do not, historically being women and minorities, and I am indeed both of those.

Which takes me back a few years to a gig at some broke unknown indie house, manned by the spoiled rich kid put in place by his daddy, with not much particular interest in the business itself, leaving about ten doors wide open for me to just stride on through, because I've always had to know my business better than anybody around, lest I feel the wrath for their continued incompetency, and I know you women out there can all feel me on this one. We do not have the luxury to not tend to our flock, not unless we want to dig holes to bury our children in, and I wouldn't recommend that for your continued peace of mind.

It was in this benign spirit of living that a complete piece of crap crossed my desk inaptly titled "The Starvation Diet", or some such crap that seems to exist only in New York City, Colorado, and SoCal (notoriously anorexic, ahem, "skinny" cities all of them). First, I took a good calm look at the rather bland and unusually thick (for the tri-state area) young girl who made the mistake of handing me that particularly unsavory turd. Oh, dear...you don't belong in New York City if you think this is what it takes to survive. Because I can make grown men cry (yes, even delusional rich white ones) I considered the best option, and that was to school this kid out loud and clearly in front of the whole office about the complete and utter condescension behind the titling of this piece of crap, especially since I was toggling homelessness in addition to hunger during the time of my employ.

I got the book back with (oh, my!) a much better title, because of my continued excellent use of office acoustics in open spaces (because they can't afford a really good and really expensive traditional office layout), instead choosing to cram cheap assistants into one big room (which was billed to me by the head sales guy as "fresh", that brilliant keyword for the inexperienced and stupid English Lit grads who flood NYC into a false sense of gentrification with their out-of-state trust funds), installed with a crazy series of bookshelves that make no sense in demarcating space, because unlike the fly fishing father who worked a respectable press many years ago, this bullshit son of his had first published his own harrowing tales of illness and insanity by purposefully choosing to breed even more crazy into his family line through another generation of ADHD/BPD-afflicted children (I caught one of his little blond girls staring blankly at a dead computer screen in the cubit next to mine; when I asked her where her shoes were, she gave me a blank stare and ran away), and that's hard, yo.

Starvation is most certainly not the same as the concept I introduce to you here today called "Intermittent Fasting" (yenta in fashion, I mean you), which does a lot of good things for the human body, that's why the most successful religious acolytes have it built into their disciplines: because it works. I've done it with great success. I do not eat breakfast every day, unlike that old motto, because I may not be hungry, or I'm busy, or coffee with milk will do until my next full meal. 
I've restricted calories for training purposes and cosmetic ones, and so there is absolutely no mystery whatsoever to me about either. Less food=less calories. But that is not an avocation to starve, like someone with a serious mental disorder effecting tremendous hurt on the body.

I know, because at the last "house" I worked for (they let me go right before the six month mark that would have granted me full health insurance benefits that they can't actually afford to pay), I was clustered next to a cadre of skinny and really nervous out-of-towners that included two generic white girls and one very gay white boy, all of whom spoke to one another in whispers about their secretive (and vomitous) bulimia that had to be done on the sly amongst them, because we only had one or two bathrooms to go around, and the sharp tang of puke wafts through a common-area office the same way gossip does: I could sense it right through the thin partition walls that barely separated us. Stranger still, they all worked compulsively repetitive jobs in production, like copy-editing and trafficking, low-end jobs that are more-or-less the same, day after soul-crushing day. Coincidence, right?

Right. And so, today's snap back to reality for all of you office workers out there in Readerland after yesterday's gluttony is not a call to starve oneself, but a "Call to Action", and that is this: why not be mindful about food all year long? What exactly do you have to lose? Heart disease? A mental illness or two? What exactly are you waiting for? Oh...I see. You want me to do it for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting

http://www.mercola.com/infographics/intermittent-fasting.htm

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing

Mindful Eating

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopia

I'm often asked about common healthcare facets of our daily lives like diet and nutrition, which is baffling. Why? I kept a food diary way back in elementary school for a class project about healthy eating habits (which were turned in and graded by our six grade teacher) and by now, I can pull a book off of any available shelf to give you handsomely tailored advice, but that's not the problem, is it? No, like most of our typical societal woes, we suffer under the weight of other people's disorders because mental healthcare, like drug addiction, is kept in the closet like the deeply guarded dark secret we pretend it is. How can that be true, when so many people have diseases?

Most often, women are the ones who question me carefully about food and the body, looking for flaws in me that they see in themselves, through my careful presentation of information that defines my vocation (which is also my pleasure) to do so. I know it's because they have multiple afflictions, not least of which is centered around a serious brain disorder (or two, or three, or four). More curious to me is why they think they can solve any problems at all, rather than consistently questioning the good people around them, because they force us to serve as a mirror to their common dysfunctions and brain misfires.

I've tried talking young women through Anorexia Nervosa, bulimia, low self-esteem, Body Dysmorphic Disorder*, plus a few other pop culture terms that were so new to a master wordsmith like me, I had to ask for definitions to them, like "carbface" (reflecting trendy anti-carbohydrate beliefs) and "fathead": that's when a disordered person sees a fatter figure in the mirror than an accurate reflection of the self, made weirder because it was told to me by a deranged young woman who thinks of herself as a figurative artist. OK....that's really bad. I have to back away from social distortions of that magnitude because it crosses over into seriously professional expert care, and I don't have time to get a degree in every discipline on the planet just for your needs alone, though I suppose I could if I had the time.

These aren't the types of conversations that one can talk their way through. Why would you think anyone could? I can't speak magical words that are the equivalent of years of intensive medical care, though like any decent woman my age, I would cure you instantly if I could. Rather, I deliver my lifelong "prescriptions" for the Art of Living Well in sober tones that addicts loathe hearing: it's hard work combined with rigorous discipline and education.  

For you? Add several prescriptions given to you by seriously qualified medical personnel, plus a team of healthcare experts to watch over you and your every move, you irresponsible immature jackass. 
But that's actually the truth. In publishing, we try to modernize it to match your brain living in this time, though honestly, most of it's old information to us, carefully designed by the intellectual elite living in this century as thus: food is not new to humans, yo.

And so it was that I followed a very good and very strict training regime tied to my martial arts schedule, because I was raised as a young girl in a school of classical French Ballet taught by a former Rockette who danced at Radio City as a teenager, and I could have followed that path, too. Ditto with gymnastics, swimming, and any other sport I liked at the time. Could you do that? No? No kidding! And so I don't tell you that about me, because what would be the point? How would you benefit from my prowess in those areas when you don't have my body, brain, training, or skill sets? You wouldn't. 

Same with my occasional and sometimes seasonal use of a certain "Fat Smash" diet (heavy on the home-prepared brown rice as a staple for the program's introductory phase), one so severe that the excellent physician who penned the book (and all the recipes in it) does it on t.v. for major network programs tied to weight loss and body conditioning as professional media content. Still not you? No kidding! I tracked my food intake, nutritional requirements, and exercise regimen through an online tool for years, with an app downloaded onto my smartphone for added convenience, next to an app that tells me what fresh fruits and vegetables are in season locally, so I can prepare gourmet meals of my own creation. Not you either? Huh...isn't that odd. 

Of course it isn't! It isn't you or your life to lead. You have to figure it out like I did, through "trial and error" guided by my own expertise, but you don't have those facets, do you? Welcome to the Twin Arts of "Empathy" and "Perfection" that define my worlds in design and publishing. Feeling small in comparison? That's because you simply don't belong there. I do. Oprah once brilliantly said (more than once, as is common for those of us living our lives through the public media arts) that if the biggest problem you have today is that you have too much food to eat, then you don't have any real problems at all, because that's true. Hers aren't about food. She can buy and eat anything she wants. No, it wasn't food that greatly pained her as a young girl. 

You did, with your gross inappropriateness through your continued untreated medical disorders, the same ones that led her male family member to transgress against her in the worst ways that a sick adult man can against a vulnerable young girl whose only crime was pleasing an older family member, as she was taught to do. You wronged her through your constant, continued neglect in this world. Not me.

http://www.fox5ny.com/news/53558105-story 

http://www.foodbanknyc.org/ 

* http://www.adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/related-illnesses/other-related-conditions/body-dysmorphic-disorder-bdd

Homeless for the Holidays

Through no fault of my own, I was homeless a few years ago because my family turned their backs on me for being economically dispensable to the unsavory family business that I had worked hard for, a business that was struggling to stay afloat from all of their excesses and not mine. I developed a publishing program for bargain books sold at B&N stores worldwide that's made me infamous throughout the industry. They wasted tens of thousands every year on decorating expenses, stupid parties, pricey real estate, and fancy white gardeners for their office balcony (that I never really had time to use), before they gave us a real 401K plan that we had to ask repeatedly for. My dad had once asked me to sell books only for a dollar or for free, as some sort of test of my "worth" as a publishing executive, and it was one that I easily accomplished. When the economy tanked yet again, they cut the staff who weren't family (or married to family/friends) and jettisoned the rest of us, which surprised me not at all, because I know how people who are bad at business react to stress: they don't. You do. 

So began yet another typically old family pattern of dysfunction spurred on by the upsets present in my life, which goes something like this: if "Mama Marie" ain't earning, then she ain't eatin', and that was certainly true for me. I almost fainted from hunger on some of the worst days (during which my father had the gall to ask me if I'd ever gone hungry, after I'd exhausted all my funds, credit, and extraneous belongings, like any normal person would do to avoid being a burden to others), in between the outrageous emails I sent to my family that gave them full advance warning (because I can succeed at business without even trying, despite the lack of their expensively bought M.B.A.'s, thus adding more fuel to their envious fire) of my upcoming eviction due to lack of payment (with no legal advice offered from my lawyer uncle or the corporate lawyer my father has on retainer for his needs), even while my father congratulated me publicly for my success at earning a spot at a prestigious writer's colony (because he wanted me to teach him writing so he could pen his memoirs and brag about it), because I worked that hard to be good for them by compensating for their deficits during my homelessness, like any real mother would. 

In return, I got bizarre offers for a limo ride to some mental institution in Westchester for all my troubles, when I really just needed an expense check sent to me, like any other businesswoman in publishing who itemizes correctly and transparently. There's no secrets here, anymore. How else was I thanked? Well, every time they made the wrong decision about me, I told them the truth about their sicknesses, illnesses, deficiencies, disorders, impairments, addictions, and crimes against humanity that they owe me "big-time" for, because the only times I get pulled into badness of any kind is at someone else's say-so, and isn't that way it always is for people of good faith? We are tried and tested to see through all the badness around us by fighting our way through it, alone. It is in this way that you've come to be my adoring audience in the year 2015: because you asked me to undergo rigorous feats of strength that you can't do, like any true hero does, and I survived to tell you the tales about my amazing, death-defying acts of life, like an ever-ongoing Homeric odyssey of epic modern proportions delivered freshly and freely almost every day.

And so it came to pass that I found myself isolated and alone at some hotel room (during our most holiest of seasons) in the Sunset Park* section of Brooklyn, living by my wits and a tenuous room connection to the hotel's WiFi service, booking rooms at B&B's in the area so as to be ready to go to work on Monday morning, because I worked my way through it, just like I always do. Sure, a few days I had a small powder blue bag with me on the elevator in the morning that was remarked upon by one of my design assistants, but that was it. 

The holiday itself found me with absolutely no contact from anyone whatsoever: no good wishes, no phone calls of forced bonhomie. 
There was no gratitude or charity towards me of on any kind, except the G-dly ones I received by my own hand, because I walked several miles to be with my parish family at St. Francis of Xavier in Park Slope (where I was "shadowing" Sunday school teachers guided by Sister Kathleen, the former principal of the elementary school across the street, by following along with her lovingly designed children's curriculum) for church service on Sunday, because I said I would.  
I said I would be there.

http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org

 https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dhs/prevention/homebase.page

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Park,_Brooklyn

Wild Turkey

"Wild Turkey Walking" by Wing-Chi Poon - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wild_Turkey_Walking.jpg#/media/File:Wild_Turkey_Walking.jpg

It's hard for me to describe my parents to friends and acquaintances. How to tell them that, entertaining as they may seem, these were the young people who were supposed to comfort me after school with a big warm hug and cookies with milk? "Ohhhmigoshhh...", as that dawning recognition spreads over their faces, I know I freaked out my new friend with that particular little exercise. Puts it in a whole new perspective, right? Exactly. And so I began a tradition of prep work before any family interaction, or, if this friend of mine is also a little dense or arrogant, I may toss them into it fresh, with no lube (as they say).

My dad lives in a place so extreme, that the people who live there ask me and my friends the same question every time we pop up there, like celebrities from outer space just there for their intense scrutiny: what do we think of West Texas? The same question, every single time, from people who see Rockefeller Center and other famous things only on t.v. What do you think we think?! It's weird, and it's the complete opposite of our reality as native New Yorkers. I turned the tables on my dad's liquored up friends the last time I visited him on Thanksgiving, by revealing the deep dark secret that my father and stepmother are actually New Yorkers (!!!), and that my dad actually gave birth to his kids while living there! That really threw them for a loop. I then asked them how they felt about New York City when they visited, to watch them squirm uncomfortably in their chairs this time, thrown as we were together from holiday invitations given out in desperation, rather than any type of familial loyalty.

On that visit, I gave my cousin a breast cancer tote bag that I bought for her, in support of her while she battled Stage Four lymphatic cancer (during which my dad frequently called me for advice), and she gave me her warm thanks, which is more than I usually get, strong-armed as I am into getting a two-way ticket to "Nowheresville", but not much else besides the obligatory room-and-board that comes with any hotel stay. My dad's weirdo friends gave my cousin obscene gestures behind her back when she wasn't looking (making her the focal point for their Conservative-fueled righteous indignation), choosing to attack her for being a societal dependent when, in truth, she doesn't choose to be an addict, which is weird coming from my father's mentally ill Vietnam vet friend with the long-term PTSD and his brittle yet openly mannishly aggressive wife. Who the fuck are they anyway? Better than us? They like to pretend New Yorkers are this disease that spreads, while they hide their trauma and sicknesses from full view, choosing instead to use them as weapons in their lives covertly. 

Me? I prefer the honesty behind my cousin's bubbly yet fake persona. Liar that she is ("When do addicts lie?" with the answer: "When they open their mouths", ba-dump bump), but at least I know that she's family. The rest of them try to pat me down for spare change that I don't have, while going on their expensively outfitted Californian pony rides and generically bland cruise vacations. Susan's at least upfront about her needs and what drives her real agenda. Not so with my dad and his crowd, people who buy heavily into the "rich white man game", which means they all pretend to be Conservative Right-Wing Christians* out west for money and job security. "Who's the bigger liar at the table?" is not a game that I like to play.

But, occasionally, when the moon aligns with the rest of the planets just right, we can have a good time, mostly by chance or my doing, or plain ole luck, because my family out west doesn't think I'm worth enough of their time to even plan events that I'd enjoy, open as I am about my lifelong preferences. I know, right? What's to miss?! Sometime our interests overlap, like my love of the outdoors and hiking, because it fits neatly within my dad's conformist "white man" persona, the one who likes to seem like a masculine hunting and fishing guy. And so, one holiday me and my ex (the upstate Indo-European) found ourselves in an old pickup truck following my dad and his family, while he picked up some domesticated animals to dump onto his ranch, because that's about as much as he does for other humans and lifeforms, sometimes. 

You just happen to be part of his schedule, like the delusional diva from "The Met" who thinks the spotlight is always on her. It's creepy, but that's his "Mad Man" generation to a "tee": they use old t.v. shows and movies like they're guidebooks to life, instead of entertainment with the occasional deeper fare thrown in, but mostly likely not, because my dad's wife doesn't "cotton to cussin'", which is part of the homespun act they put on for their new friends far out west, people who don't put together "New York" with "secretary" and "mistress" right away like we do. Wholesome, right? We usually play along with their routines because it's not worth pointing out, which is exactly why me and my ex made fun of my dad all the way from Colorado to New Mexico, about his next harebrained plan for restocking the world with hunted animals (like wild turkeys) on just his corner of the world, hoping that it spreads out from his ranch at the epicenter, so he can take all the credit for it. Professional, n'est-ce pas?

It's not exactly like working for the "Department of the Interior" for the U.S. government, is it? Nope, but that's exactly what he does: he forces his family and friends to witness him buying these poor animals and then releasing them onto his land (and his land only), to often be brutally slaughtered by the predators that live there, even as we tell him that animals migrate, and he doesn't own them or control them in any way, with extremely limited success. He may or may not understand the intent, or it might be him acting out in his delusion of grandeur because he simply doesn't care, so much does he want credit for his bizarre little experiments. It was horrifying actually. Over the years, he released Bighorn Sheep** and other animals without notifying anyone about his intentions, just to play G-d with His Creations.

That's why, over our Thanksgiving break, our dad made us watch him pick up some turkeys he bought to "grow" out at some dirty farm (the horses this farmer had were filthy up to their knees from the mud and feces he kept them penned in), by making us herd Wild turkeys onto his trailer. When we remarked on the unsanitary conditions to him as proof of his uncertain goals (he got caught behaving inappropriately and wastefully again, basically), he assured us that he would report the farmer he'd just paid thousands of dollars to do a job badly to the appropriate authorities, but I highly doubt that happened. We made fun of him with my youngest bro in the second truck all the way down to "his" ranch land (charmingly named "The Flying Asshole"), a place that's off-limits except to him and the county's Game Warden (by law), bumping over the hills and gullies to witness him doing yet another stupid thing that was waste of time and money.

On his signal, we manned the bolts to his trailer, and on the count of "three" we opened the gates to the it, to see a fast flurry of feathers pass briefly before our eyes, before the turkeys did exactly what wild turkeys do, and roost high on the treetops of the only tall trees that exist around there because it's near a pond; atop the ranch's small stand of big Cottonwood trees. For years afterwards, we jokingly asked him if he'd had any signs that they were still alive, and he'd do his "little boy" routine: pout while looking down at his hands, explaining to us one more time that they'd probably been eaten by predators, just like his foolish dreams about the non-native Bighorn sheep that we knew became coyote fodder under his watch, but we still allowed his big public display of making a show about caring for them by hiking us atop "his" mountain (competing with us the whole way uphill), with binoculars to look for them from afar.

He released them to get them killed, because he's too arrogant to consult an expert who'd guide him through it, just like his horse riding "lessons" and during a dozen other really dangerous activities where people in my family (including me) almost died under his watch. So, you can keep Thanksgiving this year, peeps. You can leave me the turkey and the "Indian" boy, though. I know what to do what them. They're the kind of natives I like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_turkey

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/wild-turkey/

*      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism

 **   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bighorn_sheep